How to convert a Facebook Personal Account to a Business Page

There is an old saying about chasing two hares and catching none. And we know many out there who have done this. Blame it on the sheer enthusiasm to self-learning or the I-know-it-all approach. They end up messing their social media presence. Often in a hurry to create a Facebook presence for their Brand, they end up with a Personal account calling it their official Facebook page. And therefore, the first name and last name becomes the name of the company that has a fictitious date of birth belonging to either the male or female sex. In some cases this Brand also went to a School, Lives in a City and Speaks many languages (Image below displays a Business Account for a leading Jewellery business that got it wrong and mixed up with a Personal Account) It is only after they get about 100, 500 or in some cases 1000 friends that they realize that what they created was not a Business Page, but just another Personal Account.

For beginners, a Facebook Page can be created for a Brand, Business Product Offering or Service Offering. Here are three key differences …

1. Unlike the Friends on your Personal Account, a Facebook Page has Likes that reflect the fan-base that the brand or business is enjoying.
2. You can create a custom Welcome Page for your Business, and add as many as custom Tabs to your Page profile while your Personal Account does not have these features.
3. Pages don’t have a timeline like your Personal Account does.

If you are facing a similar issue of toying with 2 or more accounts and /or Pages, here is some solution that could help you clear the clutter.

Step 1: Converting your Facebook Personal Account to a Facebook Page
Facebook allows you to convert your personal account to a business account (Page) while at the same time ensuring all your contacts and friends are also moved to the new account. It is also recommended that you download all the relevant information within your account including friends list, messages posted, photos uploaded etc as a measure of backup.

Here is more information on this topic. Follow this link to learn more about Downloading your Facebook Data.

Step 2: Merging your duplicate Pages into one official Facebook Page
Having duplicate facebook pages for one brand is often a trouble. With one page scoring over with more fans and activity compared to the lesser one. It is even more difficult to do away with either of the pages, as the number of fans are considerably large. For instance, we have had duplicate pages, where one had over 80,000 Likes, while the other had 40,000 likes and both were unique set of fans. The best thing for us to happen was the possibility of merging 2 Pages into one, increasing our Fan base by over 1,20,000 in a jiffy.

Remember that the Page with the lesser number of likes can only be merged with the one that has more number of likes and not vice-versa. This means if you have a nice username (fb.com/businessname) for your smaller fan-base, you might have to forego that when you merge it with the one with the higher fan-base. You can read more about this topic here.

But the good thing is going forward, you will not have the trouble of handling 2 different pages or accounts, and make sure all your fans are available at one common official page. This way you will cash in on effective social media optimization by not only chasing one hare, but catching it too.

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